Talk about "racial profiling" can cover up old-fashioned malignant racism, the Ontario Human Rights Commission says in a big new report on the problem.

David Reevely

Published on: May 3, 2017 | Last Updated: May 3, 2017 4:35 PM EDT

Demonstrators are reflected on the windows of the Ottawa police headquarters as they shout and chant for justice at Ottawa police headquarters during the March for Justice - In Memory of Abdirahman Abdi, on Saturday, July 30, 2016.James Park / Postmedia

Talk about “racial profiling” can cover up old-fashioned malignant racism, the Ontario Human Rights Commission says in a big new report on the problem.

The commission’s report, an account of what the agency’s people heard in a survey, interviews and consultations with people across Ontario as they work on recommendations for stopping the practice, is making the commission take a look even at its own work.

Ontario’s definition of racial profiling is an “action undertaken for reasons of safety, security or public protection that relies on stereotypes about race, colour, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, or place of origin rather than on reasonable suspicion, to single out an individual for greater scrutiny or different treatment.”

“The definition of racial profiling focuses on the notion that a person’s or organization’s actions are motivated by safety, security or public protection,” the commission says.

The term connotes good intentions on the part of people doing the profiling. They might be misguided, they might be poorly trained or working in badly designed systems, they might make mistakes, but at heart they’re trying to keep people and property safe.

The trouble is that that definition, even though it includes a lot of badness, is generous to some racists.

Accusing someone of racism tends to be a conversation-stopper, and in the absence of written evidence or a Klan hat, it’s hard to prove. So we dance around it, contorting ourselves to avoid accusing anyone of deliberate impropriety.

“Many people were concerned that the definition does not capture racial profiling that intentionally targets people based on race, using safety as a pretense,” the report says. When we talk about inadvertent stereotyping when what we actually have is straight-up racism, we’re confusing the issue.

It’s no surprise that a survey intended to uncover stories about racial profiling found a lot of them, from a woman who used her swipe card to get into her own office and was immediately visited by security (she wears a hijab) to a group of black men reported for trying to steal a bicycle (one of them owned it and his lock was stuck).

“I find that in some stores I am followed, watched in mirrors. When a Caucasian person walks in, they are greeted with ‘hello.’ I do not get the same treatment,” said a woman identified in the report as middle-aged and black. “It made me aware that there is a perception of my race and what I should or should not be able to afford, in some people’s eyes.”

By their nature, the reports are anecdotal. The authority figures who do these things might not be aware they’re doing them, let alone why; conversely, they’ll sometimes have good reasons the people who feel profiled never hear. There’s an absence of data in most fields.

Though less and less so in policing, where — thanks partly to work done here in Ottawa — we know that the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be stopped for a traffic violation.

A comment attributed to a white former police officer talks about how her former colleagues’ suspicions get aroused by things that don’t seem, to them, to add up: “A black person in a white neighbourhood, someone driving an expensive car in a poor neighbourhood, etc. they are trained to investigate things that seem ‘out of place.’ That is literally their job, an expectation laid out to them formally during police college.”

Sometimes they’re right, sometimes not. Sometimes what they’re doing doesn’t have the (misguided) good faith implied in “profiling” at all.

In New York City, police officers have been made to give up their tactic of stopping and frisking people without specific cause, which was not only disproportionately used on young black men but also wildly inefficient: a study found the police frisked 143 black people for each time they found something they deemed to be evidence of a crime, versus 27 stops per seizure involving white people.

The police doing the stopping and frisking must have known they were wasting a lot of time on innocent black people. They kept doing it anyway, asserting their power over people who’d done nothing wrong, until courts deemed the tactic unconstitutional.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission distinguishes between racial profiling and other forms of racist treatment, so it’s not as if the second kind of misbehaviour gets ignored. But the two are different, and naming them properly so we know what we’re dealing with is important for solving them.

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